Are US scientists really research fraud world leaders?

Which nation's scientists are most prone to falsifying their results? A statistical debate has broken out this week, following the publication of a paper claiming that US researchers "are significantly more prone to engage in data fabrication or falsification than scientists from other countries".

But as Richard Van Noorden pointed out on Nature's Great Beyond blog, this doesn't necessarily mean that US-based scientists engage in more fraud - they might simply publish fewer sloppy errors. By looking at total papers published, he calculated US researchers have to retract a smaller proportion because of fraud than those from China, India and South Korea.

Bob O'Hara, a statistician and ecologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, then crunched the numbers on his Nature Network blog. The retraction rate due to fraud for US-based researchers was slightly above the norm, but nowhere near as high as in China (about three times above average) and India (five times). The differences between the US and its Asian competitors were highly statistically significant.

French researchers emerged as the least prone to fraud in this
analysis. But as O'Hara explains, we shouldn't read too much into any of
the figures, as there's a "missing data" problem: retractions only
measure the rate at which people get caught out for fraud, not the rate
at which it is committed.

Indeed, as New Scientist's long-running investigation
into stem cell research at the University of Minnesota has shown,
papers containing manipulated data may remain unchallenged for many
years, until someone takes the time to pick them apart.

There are other biases to consider. Steen's paper confirms earlier
findings that rates of retraction are higher in more prominent journals.
That makes sense, as these papers will be subject to greater scrutiny.

In June, New Scientist found that US-based researchers were more successful than those elsewhere at getting their papers into high-impact journals
in the hot field of cellular reprogramming. If that's also true in
other areas of biomedical research, it may make US-based researchers
seem more fraudulent than they actually are.